What is it?

Text Toolkit is a free FileMaker^® Pro and Server database plugin that allows you to do just about anything you want with text.

Why it's free.

• Because Text Toolkit's features are so useful that we think they should be built into FileMaker. Since they aren't, offering them in a plugin is the next-best thing.
• We hope you'll enjoy using Text Toolkit and will want to try out other plugins in the 2empowerFM Family. We encourage you to spread the word!

Why it's better.

Other free plugins that offer some of Text Toolkit's features usually require the installation of complicated frameworks like Java or PHP, or they may be buggy, missing features, or just hard to use. Complicated frameworks can also pose security threats outside of FileMaker, such as when a 2011 Java exploit allowed banner ads served through otherwise-safe web sites to install malware on the machine of anyone who viewed the ad (not even a click on the ad was necessary).

• Text Toolkit is self-contained with nothing else to install.
• One plugin provides both regular expressions and hashing.
• Documentation is thorough and includes an examples database.
• Advanced features are included, such as regular expression match iteration and hash encoding.

The power of regular expressions.

Regular expressions find every HTML tag in the text below

Regular expressions give you the power to:

• Test if an email address looks valid
• Format digits into a phone number
• Capitalize sentences
• Turn HTML into plain text
• Examine each line of a FileMaker value list twice as fast as you can with FM's MiddleValues()
• Do something with each word in a comma separated list
• or do just about anything else you can imagine with text.

Regular expressions defined.

Regular expressions are sequences of special codes and "wildcard" characters that can be crafted to find almost any pattern within text. A pattern can match an email, HTML tag, number, word, and so on. Text Toolkit lets you search text for these patterns and optionally replace them with other patterns.

You'll find something like regular expression search and replace in every major piece of software that deals with text, from word processors to web site editors - they're just that useful. While there is a lot to learn before anyone can master regular expressions, Text Toolkit includes a guide to get you started with the easier stuff. It will also point you to web sites with tutorials, libraries of regular expressions, and expression-building tools to make regular expressions easier to use and understand.

Advanced regular expressions.

Text Toolkit integrates a third-party, Perl-compatible regular expression engine that’s fast and well tested.  Even advanced features like equivalence classes and Perl back-references are supported.  Perl-like variables are created for each matched regular expression group and iteration through multiple matches is supported.

Hash text down to size.

Text Toolkit also gives you the power of "hashing". A hash is a relatively short, fixed-length sequence of characters created by "hashing" a regular string of text.  Changing any part of the regular string of text will change its hash.

You can store the hash of one or more FileMaker fields to determine when any of them have been altered.  This can be used for security or to determine when changed records in two databases need to be synchronized.

When a hash is “strong”, it is virtually impossible to calculate what text it was created from.  Therefore, if you store the strong hash of a password instead of the password itself, it doesn't matter if the hash is stolen from your database. A thief can't use a strong hash to determine the password that created it.

Many hash methods.

2empowerFM Text Toolkit supports many hash methods: TR1, MD5, SHA1, SHA256, and SHA512 (one of the strongest hashing methods available) and uses well-tested, third-party hashing libraries. Hashes can be encoded in Base32, Hex, or a Handwriting-safe series of characters.

Text Toolkit is free, and once you start using regular expressions, you won't know how you did without them. If you've never used them, now is the time to see for yourself why they're built in to so many word processors and programming languages.

Download

Latest version is 2.48.
Changes in each version  |  Download previous versions

Install and Uninstall instructions  |  License agreement